Short day in lessons & Macanese food

We had quite the slack day today as we were only scheduled to be at the school by 2:20pm & there for about an hour. Virginia had invited us out to lunch, so we met her at noon at the 2nd & 3rd school. Helen & John (Dr. Wu, Helen's husband) joined us as well. As we were approaching the restaurant, Hong poked me & said 'knock on wood that we're not going to that awful Portuguese place' & guess where they took us???? YEP! The place where I had said earlier that I had eaten the worst lunch ever in my life. We played it off as though we had never been there before (I even recognized some of the men eating there, the ones that were staring at me as I struggled with my shrimp with my hands), I didn't want to say anything as I had talked to Virginia the other day about the worst meal we had in Macau, but without revealing the location. They ordered for us & we had a bunch of dishes to choose from. It was actually quite tasty, maybe we just didn't know what to order? (I noticed that the chinese menu was far more detailed than the English/picture menu, many more choices). Over lunch we got some pointers of where we should travel... we are motivated to go to a travel agent on our day of to finally book something!! I can't wait! :) (We have to book through a tour as it isn't recommended to travel on our own..)

We then went over to the first school where we were scheduled to meet with both Primary 5 classes to introduce ourselves. As we were walking towards the gates, we decided to look at the posters that were made for the open house. We saw many familiar faces of students, and of the foreign teachers from the U of C from last year & then... I saw myself. In about 6 different pictures. How the heck did they make up these posters so fast?? We've only been here for 2 weeks! We then looked at the posters a little closer & it was quite funny because there was at least one 'token white guy' as Hong calls it, in all of the posters. & what's even worse - Hong isn't in any of these!! She is so lucky!! They aren't the most flattering poses as well... I think they were trying to capture 'teachable moments', but this didn't work out so well as we're closing our eyes, in the middle of saying something, or when we tell the students to put their hands on their heads to be quiet! haha not lovely.

We joined 5A & 5B for a few minutes in the afternoon. Each day, when they return from lunch, the whole school does 'eye exercises' in their classrooms. It's quite similar to the brain gym that we used to do at Ranchlands, except they only do mini massages on their own face with their eyes closed. It was really neat to see some similarities in strategies to get the students focused for the rest of the day. The students then did some introductions of themselves, basically just saying their name. The first student who introduced himself (side note: & why is it always the first student to introduce themselves in these classes that seem to cause some trouble... hmm), anyways, he said my name is "Cecillia" & the whole class burst out laughing, except for this one student whose name is Cecillia. It wasn't funny. This poor little girl was obviously upset & then put her head down on the table until it was her turn to introduce herself. I understand that kids will be kids & kids are sometimes mean... and I don't want to judge the teacher, but she did nothing to diffuse the situation or deal with this boy that had just humiliated this poor girl. I don't know if it's because these teachers are nervous to have us in their classroom, but even with that student that said he likes to kill us, the behaviour is waved off. I don't understand it. I think that I'm being too judgmental and bringing assumptions into these situations, but it's very difficult not to.